MPICH-G2: A Grid-enabled implementation of the Message Passing Interface

✍ Scribed by Nicholas T. Karonis; Brian Toonen; Ian Foster

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 244 KB
• Volume: 63
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0743-7315
• DOI: 10.1016/s0743-7315(03)00002-9

✦ Synopsis

Application development for distributed-computing ''Grids'' can benefit from tools that variously hide or enable application-level management of critical aspects of the heterogeneous environment. As part of an investigation of these issues, we have developed MPICH-G2, a Grid-enabled implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) that allows a user to run MPI programs across multiple computers, at the same or different sites, using the same commands that would be used on a parallel computer. This library extends the Argonne MPICH implementation of MPI to use services provided by the Globus Toolkit for authentication, authorization, resource allocation, executable staging, and I/O, as well as for process creation, monitoring, and control. Various performance-critical operations, including startup and collective operations, are configured to exploit network topology information. The library also exploits MPI constructs for performance management; for example, the MPI communicator construct is used for application-level discovery of, and adaptation to, both network topology and network quality-of-service mechanisms. We describe the MPICH-G2 design and implementation, present performance results, and review application experiences, including record-setting distributed simulations.